2013 Goals

Generally, I like to look back over the past year’s goals and reflect on what I’ve done to achieve those goals. For some reason, I didn’t make any goals (i.e., resolutions) at the beginning of 2012. Maybe that’s why I feel that I’ve been a bit off course this year.

Things don’t always turn out like I planned, but it’s always fun to look over the year’s goals to see the direction my life took during the previous 365 days. I hate that I’m missing out on that bit of excitement this year.

While many of my peers are currently passed out in a ditch or smoking their brains out (okay, some of them are really at home with the kids), I decided I wanted to spend some time in quiet reflection this New Year’s Eve. Partly, this is because I’ve been a little sick from all the crazy weather and unhealthy food over the past week. However, I also want to start setting out some concrete plans for 2013.

Health and fitness goals

Health and fitness are the number one priority for me. I enjoy studying nutrition and trying new things. It’s also an ongoing battle that I plan to win, even if it kills me.

New diet

This is already a crazy debate between me and my friends/family, but I’ve decided to go on a completely vegan diet. You won’t see a photo of me in a spinach mankini or anything of the sort posted on my blog. I’m just trying the food. But, folks want to know why I’m taking this direction.

It’s simple.

I like to try new diets to see how they affect my health. Plus, I get to try out all kinds of new foods or combinations of foods.

I’ve tested both Eating-for-Life (Body-for-Life) and Paleo/Primal over the last couple of years. I haven’t been satisfied with either. They’re both better than eating processed junk food, but there have been too many drawbacks for me.

So, I — lover of all things bacon and dairy — will be going vegan. Actually, I’ve been about 95% vegetarian during the past month and am enjoying the extra energy I have.

I’ll see this diet through. If it works for me, I’ll stick with it. If not, I’ll try something new. I’m sure I’ll be posting about this in the future.

High Blood Pressure

One thing I’ve yet to be able to manage with any of my diets is high blood pressure. Most people in my family have problems with this, but I don’t want to take pills for the rest of my life to control it. Granted, it has gotten better over the last couple of years with a change in diet and plenty of weight loss. But, it’s not where it should be.

My stepmother and stepsister (both RNs) are pushing me to get on medication now. Therefore, I’ve got this year to fix the issue dietarily or give in to their demands.

Weight/fat loss

About a year ago, I saw the first possibility that I might have visible abs at some point in the future. But, after 12 months of Paleo/Primal eating, I found myself at the same weight that I’d started. I’ve managed to get that back under control down to roughly 225 lbs.

This year, I hope to slowly and healthfully get under 205 lbs. This is more of a goal for mid-year. I’ll be reevaluating this then.

Pushups

Earlier this year, I switched from weights to calisthenics for my strength training. This has been a bit of a struggle trying to find a good balance between endurance and strength. So, I’ve set my sights on a new pushup goal: do at least a single one-arm pushup with perfect form.

I’ve got a long road ahead of me on this one, but I’m getting closer. I’m currently progressing through uneven pushups.

Running

After trying my hand at running 5Ks, I’ve decided it’s not really my style. I’m just not built for those types of runs. Now, I’m training for shorter distances. With that in mind, I have a goal to run a 6-minute mile this year.

I probably won’t give up on longer runs entirely, but I’m going to shift my focus for a while.

WordPress goals

This is why you’re really reading this post, right? I always have plans for doing cool stuff with WordPress, and these goals are constantly changing and being refined. But, I’ve got some things I want to see through over the next quarter to half year.

Hybrid Core

In 2012, Hybrid Core became a much more robust framework for theme development. It’s great seeing it being used for theme dev in places like DevPress, AlienWP, and elsewhere.

One thing I haven’t done is promote it to others. It’s always been a framework built for, well, me. Now, it’s grown into much more, seeing millions of downloads via the various themes it’s packaged in. This year, I want to see more theme companies adopt it as a foundation for their work. This is part of the reason I moved the code base to a repository on GitHub. It makes it easier for others to get involved and improve.

Plugins

One of my immediate goals is to evaluate all of my WordPress plugins. I’ll be getting rid of a few that are outdated and completely revamping others. Outside of that, I have two plugins I plan to release soonish:

CPT Portfolio — An almost-finished portfolio plugin that any theme developer can adopt (plugin name ideas are welcome).

Issue Tracker — A bug and issue tracker plugin that’s long overdue.

I also have a few ideas on standardization for themes that build in custom post types and taxonomies. I plan to standardize some common items in plugin form so that theme developers can just get back to designing.

Publish an e-book

I’ve had an outline for an e-book sitting on my desk for about a year now. It’s simply time for me to stop being lazy and get to work on this thing. It’s going to cover some of my favorite parts of WordPress and bring them together for some awesomeness.

I can write all day. The problem is getting started. Once I get myself into my writing zone, it’s hard to stop. I need to get the ball rolling, so feel free to bug me about the book until it’s finished.

Personal goals

Outside of health and fitness, I do have some other personal goals.

Read

I’ve been lazily moving through my book collection, averaging only a book each month for the past couple of years. I love reading, but it seems like something is always getting in the way. No more.

Move

I don’t actually plan to move this year. However, I want to reevaluate where my life and career are heading 365 days from now and make a decision about where I want to go next.

Moving back to Korea is always an option. I have plenty of friends there and enjoy the Korean culture, sometimes more so than the steadily-declining United States. Another option I might consider is studying kung fu in China. I’ve found a few places that have piqued my interest.

This decision is still a lot of life experiences down the road and isn’t something I’ll decide overnight.

21 Responses

Good luck with going vegan. You should check out eatawesome.ca. That guy happens to be a WordPress developer too.

Instead of running did you ever try road cycling? It’s a totally different feeling. The fun really starts in the mountains. Climbing those legendary Tour de France cols, for example, will give you a big thrill. I can guarantee you that.

Thanks for putting the Hybrid code on Github. I may have a look at that since I always love your clean code. Of course, I’d definitely be interested in your e-book too.

I learned a lot from your work during my initiation in WordPress development. You are doing great there, your are also doing great in time management and personal development I suppose.

For the high blood pressure thing I know a one shot solution and I am afraid the root cause for it is not a simple health issue. If you like you can join me when I visit my Chinese master in China or I can just put you in contact with an American guy from Alabama currently living in China who is student in the same school as I.

This master can handle your health issue and is able to put you back on the right track. You can check the website I submited with this form then let me know if you are interested to pursue this direction

I’m always open to at least exploring other options with this because it’s something I haven’t been able to correct myself. You didn’t leave a Web site with the form though, unless you meant to directly email you, which I can do.

I tried the veganism thing too, but working at an office full time with limited food choices made it really though. My diet is about 99% pescetarian already, but cutting out more dairy is my goal for the coming year.

Your goals are very similar to mine! Fitness, health, ebook… Although I haven’t quite thought through mine enough yet to know where I’m taking action. Fitness is a big one though and I’ve been working on that for a couple of months already. I too don’t want to be dependent on medication, but I also wanted to encourage you not to be disappointed if the diets don’t work; sometimes genetics is just genetics and we’re lucky to live in a day and age where medicine can help. That said, I hope your new diet does go well and you can get your BP down!

My big thing with the BP is that it’s oftentimes a symptom of other issues. So, I don’t want to take anything that’s going to mask those problems. Of course, it’s the cause of problems of its own too. So, I want to get everything else to the best place I can get it to before going down the medication route.

But, I’m not against taking BP medication if it turns out that I simply can’t control it through diet. I already know my genes aren’t doing me any favors in this department given my family history.

(Site above is in development because I don’t have a fabulous portfolio plugin yet!)

Thank you for starting work on a portfolio plugin. The ones I have investigated out there just don’t seem to work well. and to make portfolios a “theme” doesn’t make sense to me at all. Portfolios of services, for instance, should typically be part of a larger website for a company (or, like me, a freelancer).

A lot of e-learning designers and instructors are looking for this option, too. I’m currently in a workshop about professional learning portfolios (http://sociallearningcentre.co.uk/learning-portfolios/) and I’ve been spending a couple of weeks trying to figure out ways to display a portfolio of work and learning the way I want to. For instance, I want a subject area/learning goal (say, Learning More About WordPress Sites) that has four different components (“learn,” which tracks my courses and informal learning experiences in the area; “Do,” which shows the projects I’ve started and/or completed in the area; “Reflect,” where I’d more informally blog about those projects or my learning in that area; and “teach,” which I’d fill with other resources and maybe tutorials in that area).

Thus I would answer “YES” for portfolios being hierarchical. Like you, many folks do a lot of different kinds of things for work or pleasure and would like the ability to show different aspects of those areas.

May I suggest that one thing to add to your already weighty list (tee.hee) that I almost never see: a really cogent explanation (e-book?) of how to think about, plan, and execute a non-blog-like structure for a WordPress-based site. That would delve into the things that nonprogrammers like me tend to be a bit fuzzy on (e.g., the relationship between custom taxonomies and custom post types, and under what circumstances I might want to use them).

Thanks again for all you do. I became a “member” of your site in 2011, and I’ll do that this year, too, because of said learning goal above. Cheers to your accomplishing all your life and work goals!

Love the start of your goals, the part about keeping things realistic and then the transition into vegan torture diets with no bacon and 6 minute miles with untreated high blood pressure. First of all, if you the type of person who thinks green tea can cure cancer and high blood pressure can be regulated with a vegan diet, you are practicing voodoo on yourself.

High blood pressure can be caused by lots of different factors and there is more than one medicine to bring it down. Six years ago I had 150/115 as my normal blood pressure at 34, 6 foot, 220lbs. Today I am just as fat but my blood pressure is 130/78.. But I have to take a 1/2 pill every day of metroprolol.

If you want a roadmap to good health, look at men in their 70s who are not complete messes of complaints and hospital stays. Ask them if they ever ran marathons or if they think a 6 minute mile is a good goal to have at your age. I live in Asia and every day at 4am every single man in the condo community from 40-100 start leisurely walking for at least 30 minutes and then gather and do thai chi or something like that for another 30 minutes. As the sun sets around 6pm they walk another half hour I guess. Sounds lame? Sure does to me. But at 80 some of them seem to have more energy than me sitting on my ass in front of the computer from dawn till dusk.

Just my 5 cents. I posted here last 2 years ago. I’ll see how you doing in 2 more years.

Forgot to add, here is a link to a short sci-fi book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic . There are download links on the bottom since its not copyrighted. About the aftermath of a two day long alien visitation of earth, where the aliens failed to even notice the humans (just as humans fail to notice the insects during a brief stop for a picnic by the roadside). One of the best.

First of all, if you the type of person who thinks green tea can cure cancer and high blood pressure can be regulated with a vegan diet, you are practicing voodoo on yourself.

Not sure how you got from diet helping with blood pressure to green tea curing cancer. I know for a fact that diet and exercise can help bring down blood pressure in many people. There’s nothing magical or otherworldly about it. I’ve seen it in myself. That doesn’t mean I can completely fix it without medication, but I’m going to exhaust a few options first. High blood pressure is often a symptom of other issues and “fixing” it with medication in these cases may be only masking the real problems.

But, you’re missing the point if you think trying out a vegan diet and running a 6-minute mile are all about blood pressure. The vegan diet is an experiment to see how I respond physically and mentally to something different. The 6-minute mile is for torture to set an achievable physical goal for myself.

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